August 16, 1998

By BY MARIA FLOOK

SKATING TO ANTARCTICA
A Journey to the End of the World. By Jenny Diski. 250 pp. Hopewell, N.J.: The Ecco Press. $23.95.

he end of the world'' is an idiom used as a complaint against the Nowheresville hamlets where we get stuck, or it might be a testimony of love: ''I'd
travel to the end of the world for you.'' The end of the world is also a real place. A harsh, blinding white continent, Antarctica is an immense shelf of polar-toned nothing, 24 hours of midsummer daylight, icebergs ''the
color of David Hockney swimming pools'' and acres of penguins assembled like lawn jockeys. But who really wants to go there?

Soothed by huge blank spaces, the British novelist Jenny Diski (''Nothing Natural,'' ''Monkey's Uncle'') escapes on a cruise ship to the enigmatic ice sheet at the bottom of the world in her astringent memoir/travel
diptych, ''Skating to Antarctica.'' Alongside funny, stinging insights about the polar ethos and travel notes on various ports of call, there is a wholly parallel icescape explored in these pages. Diski maps a niveous
lost continent of emotional paralysis and disconnection from her family, memories she has closeted for 30 years, since the last time she saw her mother.

It was Diski's mother who introduced her to ice, taking the girl to Queen's Ice Rink in London, starting at the age of 2. Skating felt more natural to Diski than walking. ''All the clumsiness disappeared. . . . I was perfectly equipped,
steel blade matching glossy ice . . . the skates making a sound of knives being sharpened.'' Idyllic afternoons with her mother at Queen's Ice Rink quickly ended when her family was repeatedly evicted from different
apartments and the bailiff collected most of their possessions, even Diski's ice skates, to generate funds for her father's increasing debts.

''Skating to Antarctica'' emerges as a weird skiagraphy, a double expedition into the forbidding terrain of glaciers and of self. Diski's rich day-by-day itinerary of a privileged excursion to the South Atlantic and a landing
in South Georgia is interwoven with graphic introspections about her family's disintegration. The chummy voyage of birders, Darwinites and albatross oglers advances through Antarctic ice floes -- ''The sea was veneered
with a pattern of sea ice . . . a chessboard of flat floating squares . . . strange and orderly'' -- as the author chisels at a dark and frozen personal history.

Diski's pilgrimage is half reverse directory, half Travel & Leisure fare. Pairing an Outward Bound excursion with memoir's traditional self-examination creates a surprising hybrid of the two genres. In Diski's hands, it makes for a
better mousetrap indeed. Although she is orthodox about providing proper travel checkpoints -- listing what planes took her from London to Buenos Aires, from Buenos Aires to Rio Gallegos in Patagonia, from Rio Gallegos to Ushuaia,
and then which ship shoves off for the Antarctic Peninsula -- she in fact begins the book in the remote, hard-won privacy of her own bedroom's ''white walls, icy mirrors . . . white slatted blinds. . . . A white oblivion.''

''That wish for whiteout,'' Diski writes, began when she was an inmate in a psychiatric hospital. As a young adult she overdosed on Nembutal, entering foster homes and institutions in rotation with her mother, who was on the same treadmill,
fighting depression after sulfurous battles with Diski's father. She tells us that what she really wanted was ''a place of safety.'' Today she still recalls ''the whiny voice of a young child: 'Why
doesn't someone help me?' ''

Shortly after her father's death in 1966, Diski's mother disappeared from her life, hopscotching between hospitals and murky cohabitations with men unknown to her daughter. Diski never tried to reunite with her estranged parent, and she relies
on a tidbit of quantum theory to justify her reasons for not searching for her. She describes Erwin Schrodinger's famous box: ''Consequences become real only when they are observed. The case is not decided until someone
opens the lid and looks.'' Diski explains that this is called a superposition of states, a ''mixture of the decayed and not-decayed possibilities.'' But when Diski's own daughter, Chloe, rattles this
secret box, finding her grandmother's birth certificate (the first step in researching a death certificate), the author chooses to begin her tour of the Antarctic. In fact, Diski is booked on a much more charged passage.

Shifting back and forth between her snug shipboard cabin -- as blank and empty as her ''hallowed bedroom'' at home -- and graphic scenes of her childhood at a London tenement called Paramount Court, Diski chips away at the ice block
of her youth. She examines her parents' grisly entanglements and blowups and offers perfectly tweaked depictions of their harmful world. Her charming con artist father and her unstable mother collided in violent rows that often
ended with her mother attempting suicide. In a bizarre moment in her unsettled homelife, young Diski tried to enlist Danny Kaye as her surrogate father after attending a show at the Palladium, where the entertainer invited Diski on
stage to be part of his act. ''I felt he loved me,'' she writes. ''I wanted him to be my father.''

In bed at night as her parents raged, Diski practiced furious, repetitive hand signals to God. ''With the sound of their arguments in the background, I would draw a Star of David on my chest . . . and say 'Please' to God, asking Him
to stop the fights. . . . To speed things up, I would cross myself instead.''

Her parents sexually abused Diski, involving her in threatening foreplay enacted to initiate their own intimacy. Once, when her mother took Diski into her bed, the girl rebuked her, and the mother-daughter bond was snapped. She was bumped around to foster
homes, boarding schools and hospitals, and her pattern of depressive illness was set in stone for the next many years.

The author shifts from first person to third person in scenes depicting her younger self, ''Jennifer.'' The mannerism is annoying in its oddness, but we soon see how Diski wishes to separate herself from the Jennifer entrapped in childhood.
And the reader finds relief in sanitizing passages of Antarctic scenery, lifeboat drills and group outings in rubber Zodiac craft. Diski's travel companions are pleasing eccentrics, Brits and Americans to whom she gives nicknames
like Big Jim and Less Big Jim, and there's an older couple whom she adopts as surrogate parents until she learns of their fascist ideology. Like Diane Johnson's prose in her acerbic collection of travel essays, ''Natural
Opium,'' Diski's language is charged with electric wit (no surge suppressor here) as she relates comic drawing-room scenes of her indefatigable shipmates or when she describes Antarctica's somnolent wildlife. Introducing
us to the elephant seal, she confides: ''If an honest name were to be given, they would be flaccid penis seal. . . . You would . . . shield your children's eyes from the sight.''

Diski often returns to her confessional voice: ''Some things I'll never get away from, not even in the farthest reaches of the South Atlantic. . . . The past can still make me shiver.'' Her candid remarks, twinned with wholesome
travel observations and charming lists of terms like ''pack ice, frazil, nilas, pancake ice,'' create the quirky and idiosyncratic tonalities of the narrative -- half tourist manual, half extended metaphor.

Diski's controlled inclusion of details about the Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton (men as different as day and night, the former a first-rate tragedy, the other a practical-minded mercenary) gives a further dimension
to her own story. Shackleton survived the Antarctic, and Diski suggests that it should be more important to survive an expedition than to be romanticized after dying from the cold. Wisely, Diski often retreats to her cabin, noting
that ''the wind carried icy blasts from the glacier and threw them against you like pointed sticks.''

The author's references to Shackleton and Scott recall Julia Blackburn's biography ''Daisy Bates in the Desert'' and even William T. Vollmann's novel ''The Rifles,'' in which the writer adapts his
first-person narrative to ''impersonate'' Sir John Franklin in the last brutal days of his expedition to discover a Northwest Passage. These texts examine the stressful settings and personal upheavals of people
who travel to the outer reaches of civilization for whatever reasons, but one universal constant is obsession.

Jenny Diski comes to realize that ''oblivion is a place that has no coordinates in time or space.'' In ''Skating to Antarctica,'' she suggests that a wilderness is not merely a phenomenon of rugged terrain and hostile
elements, but can be an environment born of human mood and stubborn will, a forbidding world within the mind.

Maria Flook's most recent book is ''My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance.''